Full text of "Why Its Pointless To Argue About Politics Or Religion"

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Why it’s Pointless to Argue about

Politics or Religion
And Why You Should Look to the Clouds for Answers

Version 2, November 2014
By Michael Greer

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
- from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act IT, scene ii

Everyone’s heard this bit of advice: “Don’t talk politics or religion with family and
friends. It only causes arguments and hard feelings.” What’s more, most of us know that
these topics should absolutely be avoided in business settings. After all, project teams
have enough trouble meeting deadlines and keeping the peace among stakeholders. Why
borrow trouble by getting into arguments about politics or religion? Still... When long
hours keep your team together late at night and everyone begins to grow tired and
grumpy or when you’re relaxing together after hours at the coffee shop or tavern, it can
happen. Someone let’s slip a little political rant, a philosophical criticism, or a bit of
religious dogma and wham! You’re embroiled in one of these impossible-to-win battles.

Now, I’ma writer and a trainer. I like explaining things. And, unfortunately for my
family and friends, I sometimes slip into my own passionate rants and extended speeches
in support of my political or quasi-religious perspectives — “explaining” the seemingly
unexplainable. Not surprisingly, this kind of behavior often produces a strong response
from my listener, who soon begins his or her own passionate rant. These interchanges
usually end as they do for anyone who indulges in such speechifying: In a total stalemate
with my philosophical opponent or, worse, in silent frustration for each of us.

Later, after what could have been a pleasant conversation is long over, I find myself
regretting the whole nasty interchange and wondering what happened. How could I, who
can be so supportive and tolerant in the classroom or with my clients, manage to get into
such ego-driven, horn-locking, polarizing disputes over these topics? After wrestling with
this question for some time, I think I’ve finally figured out how these over-heated
disputes happen. And I’ve also figured out why such disagreements are almost
impossible to resolve.

Why It’s Pointless to Argue About Politics & Religion (Copyright © 2010, 2014, Michael Greer)
Published on Greer’s WORTH SHARING Website: http://worth-sharing.net
OK to reproduce for not-for-profit purposes: email pm.minimalist@gmail.com or visit http://worth-sharing.net
Page 1 of 9

It’s All Personal... Really Personal!

The cloud above shows a bunch of potentially powerful, life-changing events,
experiences, or relationships that might float around in your consciousness. (Sure, you
could add lots more items, but for the sake of this article, let’s just pretend that those
shown here are comprehensive.)

As we wander through life, we find ourselves idiosyncratically choosing all sorts of
experiences based on the advice of parents, teachers, or friends. And sometimes it’s not a
matter of choice at all, but mere circumstance. The world simply takes us places we never
planned to go and delivers its lessons to us whether we seek them out or not.

Consider the two sample clouds below. They tell the story of Mr. Green and Ms. Red.

Page 2 of 9

An Example: Mr. Green’s Story

The cloud on the left (previous page) shows Mr. Green’s most significant life-changing
experiences. Each is circled in green and together they tell the unique tale of his
evolution. As a child, he read a powerful work of fiction whose protagonist completely
captured his imagination. This character and his values became a filter through which Mr.
Green viewed the world the rest of his life. Later, as a teen, he suffered through a bad
relationship with his father, who drank heavily and often delivered verbal brow-beatings
that left him emotionally scarred. This led Mr. Green to become severely intolerant of
anyone who uses alcohol, no matter how responsibly they do so. In his early twenties, he
travelled extensively throughout the South Pacific where exposure to the philosophies of
several island cultures changed his views about the way a good society should operate.
Early in his adult life he married his high-school sweetheart, only to find that over the
years, as they matured, they grew apart and he ultimately endured a painful divorce. This
left him questioning the role of marriage in society, as well as unable to trust that anyone
could ever truly love or be loved.

Bullied in his middle-school years, he developed a “strike first” attitude about dealing
with anybody who might show the least signs of aggression. And in college, after
acquiring the mentorship of a college instructor whom he believed to be a truly brilliant
leader in his field, he was deeply disappointed to learn that this person was a mere
academic poser, focused on winning any political games necessary to obtain tenure and a
life-long position at the university.

Another Example: Ms. Red’s Story

In contrast, Ms. Red’s cloud shows a life shaped by different, but equally powerful,
experiences. Her early success as a winner of an elementary school science competition
led her to a career in astrophysics, which molded both her religious perspectives and her
attitude about the role of government in supporting the sciences and supporting
humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos. The death of her father, whom she loved
dearly, strengthened her resolve to become politically active to help bring about his
dream of a stronger science program in the public schools. Support from a charismatic
and well-travelled mentor (whom she met in a comparative world culture class in college)
helped her to make many connections within the international astrophysics community.
This led to her aggressively acting as a champion of world-wide cooperation among
scientists, sometimes placing her in opposition to national government leaders.

Discovering the power of meditation on one of her trips abroad, she now meditates
regularly to help deal with stress and maintain her focus. Overall, she draws courage and
energy from the many positive experiences that have shaped her as she pushes the
boundaries of international scientific cooperation.

Completely Different World Views

When their lives began, both Mr. Green and Ms. Red had a nearly infinite range of
potential experiences available to them. Yet, through their idiosyncratic, unique
experiences, life led them to completely different perspectives on political and religious
matters. Each has developed a world view based on hard-fought struggles to derive
meaning from powerful, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful, events they’ ve lived
through. And these world views, precisely because they were so hard-fought, are
something they feel they have earned and will continue to cling to as they refine
their unique religious and political frameworks.

So when you tangle with either of them while arguing a particular religious or
political point, you are essentially tangling with all that history, all that pain, all
those joys, and all those hard-fought struggles to find meaning.

Is it any wonder that in the midst of such arguments, when you find yourself blasted by a
passionate roar from your opponent, you sometimes feel surprised and shocked? And you
end up asking yourself: “Whoa! Where did that come from?”

The truth is, it’s almost impossible for you to know fully “where it came from,” since the
passionate roar that you provoked has roots that go deep into this person’s personal (and
largely idiosyncratic) history.

Evolution of Personal Political & Religious Views: The Happy Face
Version

So what might we generalize from the examples of Mr. Green and Ms. Red? The slightly
whimsical graphic below summarizes what might be a reasonable model for the evolution
of our religious and political beliefs.

Unique Miseries & Joys

Unique
Personal
Vision

“Born Again" Passion

& Need to Rant!

In a nutshell, the unique miseries and joys we experience are powerful emotional events
that take their toll and demand to be resolved. As these powerful emotional events pile
up, we eventually develop an enormous need to become introspective as we try to figure
out what they all mean. Sometimes this introspection prompts us to do relevant research.
Often, however, the topics we are drawn to investigate usually resonate to the same
emotional frequencies as the events that prompted our introspection. In other words, the
topics of study that we seek out typically help us validate our experiences and help us
decode the meaning in ways that seem consistent with our unique “cloud” of experiences.

Ultimately, we develop a distinctive personal vision of the way the world works. And
given enough time to fall in love with it, we might even develop our own “born again”
passion for this vision and set forth to preach our newly discovered gospel to anyone
who’ll listen. We don’t necessarily mean any harm or disrespect with such preaching...
we just want to share that amazing, empowering feeling that washed over us when we
finally “figured it all out!”

Why It’s Pointless to Argue About Politics & Religion (Copyright © 2010, 2014, Michael Greer)
Published on Greer’s WORTH SHARING Website: http://worth-sharing.net

OK to reproduce for not-for-profit purposes: email pm.minimalist@gmail.com or visit http://worth-sharing.net
Page 5 of 9

Evolution of Personal Religious & Political Views: The Waterfall Version

Now if you are a student of project management or if you dislike happy faces, you might
find the diagram below to be more palatable than the previous -- especially since it looks
more “serious,” and resembles the structures often used to depict project life cycles.

We experience powerful emotional
events (culturally-specific, unique,
idiosyncratic, and random).

We struggle mightily to find meaning in
these events, causing themes to emerge.

We experience new events that provide

evidence to support our themes.

Our themes broaden and become more
powerful, helping us “find” even more
evidence to support them.

Our themes coalesce into unshakable
world views. We aggressively advocate for
them, arguing & becoming more invested.

The boxes speak for themselves. However, there is this fairly daunting fact to
consider: In each domain of thought, politics or religion, there is a nearly infinite
collection of bits of evidence that can be found to support... and firmly cement in
place... almost any chosen theme!

In other words, if you wish to cobble together a collection of “facts” to support a
particular religious view or political philosophy we have plenty of sources to draw
upon, including:

Thousands of years of recorded human history

Thousands of human cultures with differing perspectives

Thousands of authors and sacred texts, past and present

An internet that helps us find reference sources for all of the above

A daily stream of current events and editorial opinions served up by the internet
and traditional media sources

The internet is particularly problematic because it allows easy collaboration among
people who would otherwise be separated by extreme geographical and cultural
distances, as well as extreme political and religious views. To put it a bit starkly, the ‘net
allows a handful of far-flung crazies who would otherwise have no real voice to assemble
themselves in online communities that provide each other with substantial comfort and
reinforcement for their ideas, no matter how odd they may seem to the rest of us!

My point: No matter what political or religious viewpoint you select in order to

breathe meaning into your life’s unique miseries and joys, if you take the time to
search, you will be able to find ample evidence to support it.

Why It’s Pointless to Argue About Politics or Religion

Now here’s the problem: Most of the time our hard-won vision of how the world works
remains quietly concealed in our hearts. Yet it’s always there, just below the surface,
waiting to explode all over anyone foolish enough to challenge us with a severely
contradictory vision. After all, we’ve got way too much effort invested in this world view
to allow it to be quickly changed by anyone. The result: Whether we like it or not, we
sometimes stumble into one of those intense and unwinnable verbal battles we all find so
frustrating.

Think about it: How can we ever know enough about the experiences and struggles-for-
truth that lay beneath another person’s world view to enable us to adequately judge its
validity? Can we really presume to be able to stand back and critique a world view
that is built on a foundation of countless unique, idiosyncratic pains and joys that
we ourselves have never experienced? Certainly not! That’s why if we try making
such judgments, we soon learn that the emotional energy behind our listener’s world view
generates a vigorous argument that ultimately leads nowhere... aside from an exchange
of philosophical generalities supported by carefully-chosen (and highly idiosyncratic and
personal) anecdotes.

The bottom line: It’s a waste of time (and toxic to your relationships) to indulge in
arguments over religious or political philosophies.

So Don’t Argue: Be an Anthropologist... And Try to See Into the Cloud

In matters of political or religious opinion, as Star Trek’s Borg might say: “Resistance is
futile!” One well-intentioned passionate assertion bangs against another well-
intentioned passionate assertion. Or one negative rant is met by an opposing
negative rant. Either way, smacking together all these visions and theories and end-point
conclusions and derived meanings is simply futile. When you are confronted with a broad
philosophical conclusion without “seeing the work” of the person who solved the puzzle
beneath it, it simply hangs in the air between you — where it is met by your own
alternative broad philosophical conclusion. The result: At best, you’ ll be talking past each
other. At worst, you become disrespected for the “stupidity” of your “ridiculous” position
or make an enemy of your fellow debater.

Instead of getting ensnarled in one of these pointless interchanges, I recommend
that you try to see into the cloud. That is, try to actively imagine the cloud of
experiences that your fellow debater has experienced. Try to discern exactly his or her
unique pains and joys. When you hear a political or religious or political assertion that
starts to make you crazy, try saying something like this:

“Wow! That’s interesting! How’d you come to that conclusion? Tell me more
about what led you to this perspective.”

Then, when your fellow philosopher begins to answer this question, listen. Really listen.
Listen with your heart. Try to see the links between her personal experiences and
her formal philosophy.

Become an amateur anthropologist, seeking to learn exactly what dwells inside that
unique cloud of experience that has formed this person’s world view. Listen to the
position, accept it (not necessarily agree, simply accept it) as it stands. Ask where it came
from, then listen, learn, ask for elaboration, probe, relate, empathize, and try your hardest
to understand with both your head and your heart.

As Stephen Covey says, “Seek first to understand than to be understood... The deepest
hunger of the human heart is to be understood, for understanding implicitly affirms,
validates, recognizes and appreciates the intrinsic worth of another."

So instead of engaging in a political or religious battle, give someone the opportunity
to be understood. Who knows? You may broaden your own perspective. And, better
yet, maybe someday she’ ll return the favor.

Challenges

Reflections

Reflect on these questions:

Which of your project team member or project stakeholders seem to have political
or religious perspectives that “make you crazy?”

What, specifically, could you do to learn more about this person’s evolution and
how these perspectives were shaped?

Despite your disagreements, what political or religious values might you have in
common with this person?

Team Challenges

Ask your team (cautiously, tactfully, and only if it’s OK in your organization’s culture):

Are there subtle ways that clashes in political or religious perspectives are getting
in the way of our work?

Could we try to be more sensitive to the unique personal history of our fellow
team members or stakeholders in order to develop greater respect for their
“different” world view?

Project Manager Challenges

(Again, consider using each of the suggestions below cautiously, tactfully, and only if it’s
OK in your organization’s culture.)

If you observe serious clashes in political or religious perspectives between team
members, encourage those who are clashing to “take a break,” step back from
their arguments, and share a little about their history and evolution. (Encourage
each to listen, not judge, and learn about the other’s life-shaping events and how
these create a framework for their world-view.)

Share this blog post, including the graphics, with those who are having
philosophical clashes. Ask them to compare “clouds,” share life-shaping
experiences, and try to deeply understand (but not necessarily agree with) each
other’s world views.

Published on Greer’s WORTH SHARING Website: http://worth-sharing.net

OK to reproduce for not-for-profit purposes: email pm.minimalist@gmail.com or visit http://worth-sharing.net

Page 9 of 9

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Full text of "Why Its Pointless To Argue About Politics Or Religion"

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